Yen Dieu Pham

Walid Maalej, Yen Dieu Pham, Larissa Chazette

Requirements Engineering (RE) is the discipline for identifying, analyzing, as well as ensuring the implementation and delivery of user, technical, and societal requirements. Recently reported issues concerning the acceptance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions after deployment, e.g. in the medical, automotive, or scientific domains, stress the importance of RE for designing and delivering Responsible AI systems. In this paper, we argue that RE should not only be carefully conducted but also tailored for Responsible AI. We outline related challenges for research and practice.

Yen Dieu Pham, Lloyd Montgomery, Walid Maalej

Legacy software systems typically include vital data for organizations that use them and should thus to be regularly maintained. Ideally, organizations should rely on Requirements Engineers to understand and manage changes of stakeholder needs and system constraints. However, due to time and cost pressure, and with a heavy focus on implementation, organizations often choose to forgo Requirements Engineers and rather focus on ad-hoc bug fixing and maintenance. This position paper discusses what Requirements Engineers could possibly learn from other similar roles to become crucial for the evolution of legacy systems. Particularly, we compare the roles of Requirements Engineers (according to IREB), Building Architects (according to the German regulations), and Product Owners (according to "The Scrum-Guide"). We discuss overlaps along four dimensions: liability, self-portrayal, core activities, and artifacts. Finally we draw insights from these related fields to foster the concept of a Requirements Engineer as a distinguished profession.

Yen Dieu Pham, Davide Fucci, Walid Maalej

Due to their characteristics, millennials prefer learning-by-doing and social learning, such as project-based learning. However, software development projects require not only technical skills but also creativity; Design Thinking can serve such purpose. We conducted a workshop following the Design Thinking approach of the d.school, to help students generating ideas for a mobile app development project course. On top of the details for implementing the workshop, we report our observations, lessons learned, and provide suggestions for further implementation.